“Yes,” G.J. interrupted, bursting out with a kind of savagery that he could not explain.  “Yes.  She’s young, and she finds even my age spicy.  There’d be something quite amusingly piquant for her in marrying a man nearly thirty years her senior.”

Concepcion advanced towards him.  There she stood in front of him, quite close to his chair, gazing down at him in her tight black jersey and short white skirt; she was wearing black stockings now.  Her serious face was perfectly unruffled.  And in her worn face was all her experience; all the nights and days on the Clyde were in her face; the scalping of the young Glasgow girl was in her face, and the failure to endure either in work or in love.  There was complete silence within and without—­not the echo of an echo of a gun.  G.J. felt as though he were at bay.

She said: 

“People like you and Queen don’t want to bother about age.  Neither of you has any age.  And I’m not imploring you to have her.  I’m only telling you that she’s there for you if you want her.  But doesn’t she attract you?  Isn’t she positively irresistible?” She added with poignancy:  “I know if I were a man I should find her irresistible.”

“Just so.”

A look of sacrifice came into Concepcion’s eyes as she finished: 

“I’d do anything, anything, to make Queen happy.”

“Yes, you would,” retorted G.J. icily, carried away by a ruthless and inexorable impulse.  “You’d do anything to make her happy even for three months.  Yes, to make her happy for three weeks you’d be ready to ruin my whole life.  I know you and Queen.”  And the mild image of Christine formed in his mind, soothingly, infinitely desirable.  What balm, after the nerve-racking contact of these incalculable creatures!

Concepcion retired with a gesture of the arm and sat down by the fire.

“You’re terrible, G.J.,” she said wistfully.  “Queen wouldn’t be thrown away on you, but you’d be thrown away on her.  I admit it.  I didn’t think you had it in you.  I never saw a man develop as you have.  Marriage isn’t for you.  You ought to roam in the primeval forest, and take and kill.”

“Not a bit,” said G.J., appeased once more.  “Not a bit....  But the new relations of the sexes aren’t in my line.”

“New?  My poor boy, are you so ingenuous after all?  There’s nothing very new in the relations of the sexes that I know of.  They’re much what they were in the Garden of Eden.”

“What do you know of the Garden of Eden?”

“I get my information from Milton,” she replied cheerfully, as though much relieved.

“Have you read Paradise Lost, then, Con?”

“I read it all through in my lodgings.  And it’s really rather good.  In fact, the remarks of Raphael to Adam in the eighth book—­I think it is—­are still just about the last word on the relations of the sexes: 

“Oft-times nothing profits more Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right Well-managed; of that skill the more thou know’st, The more she will acknowledge thee her head And to realities yield all her shows.”

G.J., marvelling, exclaimed with sudden enthusiasm: